Featured Ebooks
Welcome
May celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Works within this collection acclaim how Eastern culture has influenced American pop culture, politics, food, and overall well-being. Titles also include identity reflections of first and second-generation families of Asian and Pacific Islander descent in America.
For more information, please visit the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month website hosted by the Library of Congress.
Asian Pacific American Heritage Books
Global Asian American Popular Cultures
A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints--such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce--have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of "Asian" and "Asian American" are counterbalanced within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports.
K-pop Live : Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance
In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the meteoric ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media, situating a feverish cross-media partnership within the Korean historical context and broader questions about what it means to be "live" and "alive." Based on in-depth interviews with K-pop industry personnel, media experts, critics, and fans, as well as archival research, K-pop Live explores how the industry has managed the tough sell of live music in a marketplace in which virtually everything is available online. In an era when digital technology inserts itself into nearly all social relationships, Kim reveals how "what is live" becomes a question of how we exist as increasingly mediated subjects, fragmented and isolated by technological wonders while also longing for a sense of belonging and being alive through an interactive mode of exchange we often call "live."
Bollywood and Postmodernism
‘New Bollywood'has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood films just uninspired Hollywood rip-offs, or does their borrowing signal genuine innovation within the industry? Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this innovative study reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the 21st century.
Manga and Anime Go to Hollywood
The media industries in the United States and Japan are similar in much the same way different animal species are: while a horse and a kangaroo share maybe 95% of their DNA, they're nonetheless very different animals-and so it is with manga and anime in Japanese and Hollywood animation, movies, and television. Though they share some key common elements, they developed mostly separately while still influencing each other significantly along the way. Packed with original interviews with top creators in these fields and illuminating case studies, Manga and Anime Go to Hollywood helps to parse out these these shared and diverging genetic codes, revealing the cross-influences and independent traits of Japanese and American animation. Northrop Davis paints a fascinating picture of the interrelated history of Japanese manga/anime and Hollywood since the Meiji period through to World War II and up to the present day - and even to into the future.
This Is One Way to Dance
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. T
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express : A History of Chinese Food in the United States
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction category Finalist in the Culinary History category of the 2016 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso's chicken. Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed--not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang's and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe.
The Most Beautiful Thing
A warmhearted and tender true story about a young girl finding beauty where she never thought to look. Drawn from author Kao Kalia Yang's childhood experiences as a Hmong refugee, this moving picture book portrays a family with a great deal of love and little money. Weaving together Kalia's story with that of her beloved grandmother, the book moves from the jungles of Laos to the family's early years in the United States. Minnesota Book Award Finalist, ALA Notable Children's Book, New York Public Library Best Book for Kids, NPR Best Book of the Year.
Saving Face
Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The many images used to describe the prototypical Asian family have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian immigrant families in a changing world as recalled by the people who lived them first-hand: the grown children of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Drawing on extensive interviews, sociologist Angie Y. Chung examines how these second-generation children negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family responsibilities and upbringing.
The Resilient Self : Gender, Immigration, and Taiwanese Americans
The Resilient Self explores how international migration re-shapes women's senses of themselves. Chien-Juh Gu uses life-history interviews and ethnographic observations to illustrate how immigration creates gendered work and family contexts for middle-class Taiwanese American women, who, in turn, negotiate and resist the social and psychological effects of the processes of immigration and settlement. Mourning their lost careers and lacking fulfillment in homemaking, these highly educated immigrant women were forced to redefine the meaning of work and housework, which in time shaped their perceptions of themselves and others in the family, at work, and in the larger community.
Invisible Gifts
In her first full-length collection of poems, Win depicts a colorful world imbued with unexpected paradoxes: nature is both comforting and savagely unnerving; love is permanent and fleeting; the accuracy and flaws of memory abound. Her experiences with illness and recovery intertwine with her identity as a Burmese American daughter of immigrant doctors, flowing in poems like "Hands":My father's hands, frail birds, shaking wings. / In Burmese, "win" means bright. / Hands that stitched skin together and brought back life. Win's unique perspective and artful language offer readers insight into how the heart can bend and mend without breaking.
Permutations of a Self
Permutations of a Self grapples with issues of belonging and connection, all from the perspective of someone who does a lot more observing and ruminating than living in the present. Most of the poems draw from Nguyen's imperfect memory of himself and others as it changes throughout time. In many ways, the poet feels like an outsider in his own family because he has gradually forgotten how to speak Vietnamese, his native language that he once knew so well. The poems in this manuscript are as much about coming to terms with that as they are about trying to reconcile what it means to be a part of his family. Interspersed throughout are threads connecting the poet to each one of his family members. They are the moments he turns back to again and again when he is lonely, confused, or unsure about where he comes from and where he is going.
Eyes of Compassion
In the mid-1960s, Thich Nhat Hanh was a little-known Vietnamese Zen monk, touring the United States on behalf of the cause of peace in his homeland. Jim Forest, a Catholic peacemaker, was asked to accompany him on his speaking engagements. From there emerged a friendship over many decades, in which Jim learned through conversations and daily life about Nhat Hanh's spiritual teachings on mindfulness and the inner peace that is necessary for promoting world peace. Over the years Thich Nhat Hanh became one of the most influential and revered spiritual teachers in the world. Jim Forest's intimate portrait, which includes photos and other illustrations, is a unique introduction to a modern spiritual master and his teachings.
Building Filipino Hawai'i
Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, Roderick Labrador delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawai'i have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity. In particular, Labrador speaks to the processes of identity making and the politics of representation among immigrant communities striving to resist marginalization in a globalized, transnational era.
Anna May Wong
Pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made more than sixty films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and even starred in her own television show. Her work helped shape racial modernity as she embodied the dominant image of Chinese and, more generally, "Oriental" women between 1925 and 1940. In Anna May Wong, Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong's life and work as a consummate artist by mining an historical archive of her efforts outside of Hollywood cinema. From her pan-European films and her self-made My China Film to her encounters with artists such as Josephine Baker, Carl Van Vechten, and Walter Benjamin, Lim scrutinizes Wong's cultural production and self-fashioning. Byconsidering the salient moments of Wong's career and cultural output, Lim's analysis explores the deeper meanings, and positions the actress as an historical and cultural entrepreneur who rewrote categories of representation.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American "settler complicities" and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
Writing Against Racial Injury
Writing against Racial Injury recalls the story of Asian American student rhetoric at the site of language and literacy education in post-1960s California. What emerged in the Asian American movement was a recurrent theme in U.S. history: conflicts over language and literacy difference masked wider racial tensions. Bringing together language and literacy studies, Asian American history and rhetoric, and critical race theory, Hoang uses historiography and ethnography to explore the politics of Asian American language and literacy education: the growth of Asian American student organizations and self-sponsored writing.